The horsemeat discovered on British dinner tables last week was (1) supplied by a Swedish frozen foods marketer that had (2) outsourced meal preparation to a French company that (3) operates a factory in Luxembourg that (4) uses meat imported, (5) via a Dutch agent, (6) from Romania. At least that is the BBC’s version of the byzantine sequence (other versions differ in minor details). What is clear is that the affair has thrown another tanker-load of gasoline on the British people’s already incandescent rage at the European Union (EU) and its role in undermining their sovereignty.

Although the American press has been slow to sense the historic significance of recent events in the UK, British exasperation with the EU has the potential to shake the latter-day world order. A symptom of the strains is that the UK’s pro-EU Prime Minister, David Cameron, has felt obliged to promise the British electorate a straight in-out referendum on British membership of the EU. Cameron probably doesn’t realize it yet but he may just have touched off a geopolitical avalanche.

Certainly his referendum is a destabilizing – if in my view highly welcome – move at a time when the world economic order has rarely seemed more precarious. That order is founded on an overtly anti-democratic commitment to globalism on the part of the foreign policy elites of the UK and United States. Yet globalism is not working and the evidence of its failure mounts daily. The UK’s horsemeat woes aside, the United States has plenty of reasons to wonder about globalism’s impact on the American way of life. Just in the last few weeks alone the American public has awakened to the reality that:

(1) Boeing, a company that subsumes within it virtually all the once-independent corporations that put a man on the moon in 1969, has become disastrously hollowed out, and

(2) the New York Times’s computer system has been repeatedly hacked by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

As history has repeatedly shown, the course of international politics is a notable exemplar of chaos theory. Just as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in a Brazilian rain forest may trigger a hurricane in Texas, one embattled British politician’s narrowly partisan maneuvering – which is what Cameron’s referendum is all about – could quite possibly unleash transformative change around the world. Certainly this would not be the first time that large global consequences have flowed from narrowly-based initial developments. It was the intervention of a diminutive pistol-wielding Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, that set off World War I. For a more recent, if similarly calamitous, manifestation of the power of chaos theory, consider how different the world would be today had not a devout, soft-spoken Saudi Arabian engineer inherited a significant fortune from his estranged father. That engineer was Osama bin Laden and his inheritance, of course, bankrolled al Qaeda.

Like Gavrilo Princip’s pistol shot and bin Laden’s inheritance, Cameron’s referendum could have far-reaching consequences. The difference this time is that – at least in the view of those of us who have been suspicious of globalism all along – most of the consequences will be benign. The fact is that, in the face of East Asia’s relentless pursuit of one-way free trade, Washington’s vaunted strategy of “global leadership” amounts to borrowing from China to save the world from China. A British withdrawal from the EU – which would be the likely result of any honestly structured referendum – may well be just the shock therapy needed to jolt policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic into rejoining the reality-based community.

If the British referendum does trigger a rethink in the United States, it would not be the first time in the recent past that the mother country has led American opinion.

In the 1960s, for instance, it was the UK far more than the US that created that decade’s famous youth culture. (The Beatles were global superstars by 1963, two years before Allen Ginsberg invented flower power and six years before the boomers converged on Woodstock.)

In social policy too, the UK has tended to move earlier than the United States. In the busy parliamentary year of 1967, the British legalized both abortion and homosexual behavior, for instance. That was six years ahead of Roe vs Wade and more than three decades before remaining anti-gay laws in the United States were struck from the statute book.

In world affairs too, the British have often led: London established full diplomatic relations with Beijing as early as 1972, for instance – nearly seven years ahead of Washington. Similarly the British were earlier to embrace the fashion for financial and economic deregulation. The ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had struck vigorous root among the British media and political establishment as early as 1976, and Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in May 1979, eighteen months ahead of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory. (As late as 1978 incidentally pro-regulation Democrats had won a healthy majority in Congress.)

The irony is that Cameron is hardly central casting’s idea of a bomb-thrower. As for the parliamentarians who have forced his hand, they hail mainly from the right of his Conservative Party and see themselves as enthusiastic supporters of global free trade.

That said the wider cause of globalism is now thoroughly discredited in the UK. Not the least of its problems is its close association with the bankers of the City of London. At a time when countless ordinary Britons have been badly squeezed by economic austerity, the charlatans and outright crooks of the City have continued to award themselves outrageous pay packages.

Even Cameron does not conceal his disgust with some aspects of globalism, not least its role in undercutting the British tax base. Feelings have not been soothed by the release of a report documenting how major U.S. corporations minimize their British tax liabilities by channeling their British revenues through tax havens. Among corporations cited were such household names as Starbucks, Google, and Amazon, which despite doing huge business in the UK pay hardly any tax there. Some home-grown British corporations such as Vodafone and Barclays have also been pilloried. Much of the criticism moreover has come from media organizations like the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail that have traditionally been pro-business pillars of the Conservative establishment.

Top Conservatives generally hope the UK will remain in the EU. The problem is that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. While they believe in maintaining close trade links with the continent, few of them identify with Brussels’s increasingly insistent push for “ever closer union” – political and social union, that is. Thus Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, a Conservative member of the House of Lords and a former intelligence chief, cites the European justice agenda as a major source of friction. A key issue is the so-called European Arrest Warrant which renders the British government powerless to second-guess extradition requests from other EU nations. As a result, several British citizens have suffered scarifying legal misadventures in, among other places, Greece. “The problem is that the system is based on the fiction that police, courts and prisons are all equally good inside all EU countries,” says Neville-Jones. “That is patently not the case and the result is anomalies which, given UK political culture and the activities of constituency MPs, cannot be shoved under the carpet.”

Douglas Carswell, a Hayekian who counts as one of the Conservative Party’s most passionate Euroskeptics, cites the EU’s anti-democratic character as a principal bone of contention. “My American friends have no idea how anti-democratic the EU really is,” he says. “It has been calculated that between 70 percent and 80 percent of our laws are now coming from the EU bureaucracy. In American terms, it is as if federal agencies were able to make laws without reference to Congress or to the states.”

Unfortunately, as the prominent Labor Party Europhile Denis MacShane points out, any effort now by the UK to roll back the less welcome aspects of the European “project” comes a little late. “Cameron needs to persuade 26 other governments and parliaments that opening a major treaty revision to satisfy Britain is something to be desired,” he recently commented. “A new treaty would require a nightmarish ratification process involving referendums in countries like Denmark, France, and Ireland that would plunge Europe into years of inward-looking rows at a time when it still hasn't emerged from the worst economic crisis in its history.”

Viewed purely in terms of British party politics, however, Cameron’s gambit is a Machiavellian masterstroke. In an inspired gimmick, he has promised that the referendum will be held only AFTER the Conservative Party is returned to power in a general election expected in 2015. As Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition Labor Party, has already ruled out a referendum, this leaves countless anti-EU Labor voters high and dry. Even the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a small anti-EU group, has been cunningly sidetracked. Drawing its support mainly from the right, UKIP had previously loomed as an ever larger threat to the Conservatives’ traditional base. Now the Conservatives can credibly allege that a UKIP vote will merely divide the Euroskeptics and let in the Labor Party (a majority of whose leaders are dyed-in-the-wool Europhiles). UKIP stalwarts like Godfrey Bloom, a member of the European Parliament, splutter that Cameron will in the end renege on a straight in-out vote. This might well be a correct reading of Cameron’s instincts but the pressures on Conservative leaders, not least from their own rank-and-file, to follow through with an honest referendum is now intense.